David Janczewski and the problem a vault couldn't solve

The business that became Coincover acquired some momentum at a coffee bar. David Janczewski had an idea about protecting cryptocurrency, but insurance was unfamiliar territory. A chance meeting with Insurtech Gateway founder Stephen Brittain led to another conversation, then a pitch to people who understood the risks. Their response, as Janczewski later recalled it, was a modestly encouraging: “Well… it’s not bonkers.”

Entrepreneurship has produced less useful compliments. An expert willing to entertain your idea can be worth considerably more than an acquaintance willing to admire it. Janczewski needed a way into a business whose workings he did not yet understand. The introduction helped him find one.

His earlier career had already brought him unusually close to the machinery of trust. He worked at the Royal Mint, where money has weight, gold occupies space and ownership comes with an institutional history. Digital assets offered a different arrangement. They could remain perfectly intact while their owner became unable to reach them.

That gap became his subject. Coincover, which he co-founded with Adam Smith in Cardiff in 2018, built recovery and protection services around the possibility that people, technology or businesses would fail. It is a practical premise with an awkward sales challenge: customers have to think about the bad day before it happens.

Gold, with a different kind of ledger

Janczewski joined the Royal Mint in 2002. Before that, he had founded and run businesses in online retail and property development. His route through the Mint included product development and international sales, followed by a marketing role during the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. He eventually worked on new business and strategic intelligence.

Those jobs involved several versions of the same commercial task: finding a customer for something an organisation knows how to produce. A commemorative coin, an international order and a new digital service each require a different explanation. His experience crossed the product, the market and the institution behind them.

In November 2016, the Royal Mint and CME Group announced plans for Royal Mint Gold. The proposal joined physical bullion stored in the Mint’s vaults to a digital ownership record. CME would develop and operate the trading platform. Buyers could trade the record while the underlying gold stayed put.

The appeal was concrete. Gold could be reassuringly solid and inconveniently cumbersome at the same time. Moving the ownership record offered a way to change the transaction without asking the bullion to travel. The project placed a longstanding institution inside a new technical experiment, with Janczewski representing its new-business ambitions.

“Gold trading still isn’t easy and it’s costly,” he said at the time. For all the novelty surrounding blockchain, the problem was recognisable: make something easier to buy, hold and sell. His interest in digital currencies developed through that work on digital gold. Alongside the possibilities, he began to see the consequences of inadequate protection.

A product for the day something goes wrong

Digital ownership makes a distinction that ordinary experience can blur. The asset and access to the asset are separate things. A wallet can contain value, and the ledger can continue recording it, while the person entitled to use it has lost the necessary credentials. The accounting can be immaculate. The owner can still have a terrible afternoon.

In Janczewski’s account, the Royal Mint project helped reveal the need for protections that consumers could depend on. A system intended for everyday financial life had to accommodate forgotten credentials and technical complexity. Asking everyone to become unusually careful forever would leave rather a lot riding on everyone.

Coincover’s early offer combined security technology, lost-key recovery and an insurance-backed guarantee. Adam Smith brought experience in technology security, including work across financial services, military and policing settings. Their venture connected the problem of managing digital assets with people accustomed to planning for failure.

The distinctions within that offer matter. Recovery concerns restoring access. Transaction protection concerns risks around the movement of assets. Insurance-backed compensation has its own arrangements and conditions. Coincover’s current description explicitly says the company itself does not provide insurance coverage for assets or operations. The machinery behind reassurance deserves a careful reading.

For Janczewski, the commercial challenge also involved explaining human error without insulting the human. Fear of a hacker is easy to understand. The possibility that your own misplaced information might create the problem is harder to sell politely. His interviews return to the need to make digital assets usable by people who cannot spend their lives studying their security arrangements.

Amsterdam, without a script

A glimpse of the early founder comes from a June 2019 demonstration at Digital Insurance Agenda in Amsterdam. Shortly before appearing, Janczewski decided to abandon his prepared script. He was nervous about having to follow it exactly; speaking more freely made him feel more comfortable.

Asked afterwards how he had felt leaving the stage, he answered: “Ready to hit the bar!” The next destination was the company’s stand, where interested audience members might be waiting. A successful presentation still had to become a useful conversation.

He was candid about the response, too. There had been some interesting conversations, and he would have welcomed more. It is an appealingly ordinary account of a startup outing: relief, optimism and the continuing need to find customers. The demo had ended. The selling had several hours left.

“plan to succeed, but expect to learn”

David Janczewski, on building a business

His published advice from that period allows for uncertainty. Find the people with relevant expertise. Admit when you need help. Keep enough flexibility to respond to what you discover. There is a commercial discipline behind that modesty: a product has to reach the market while there is still time and money to improve it.

The capital behind the contingency plan

Coincover’s early backing included a Welsh angel syndicate led by Ashley Cooper, supported by the Wales Angel Co-investment Fund. Funding began in 2018. The business was assembling a network of people willing to finance the unglamorous proposition that crypto needed a dependable recovery plan.

In July 2021, it announced a $9.2 million Series A led by Element Ventures. Other participants included DRW Venture Capital, CMT Digital, Avon Ventures, Valor Equity Partners, FinTech Collective and Susquehanna. The Development Bank of Wales also provided follow-on investment. For a Cardiff company serving an international market, the investor list joined local support to overseas capital.

Another $30 million round, led by Foundation Capital, was announced in February 2023. Janczewski described the money as a way to expand hiring, improve products and add partnerships. The work behind those uses was specific: getting protection services into more of the businesses through which customers held and used digital assets.

Partnerships made the offer more useful. A protection provider can reach people through the wallet companies and institutions they already use. In a public post about Fireblocks in 2023, Janczewski connected that partnership to his ambition to rebuild confidence in digital assets. The product was becoming part of another organisation’s service.

The trust question persisted beyond technical integration. Coincover’s 2023 consumer research examined hesitation about fraud and stability, and proposed voluntary industry standards and ways to recognise providers that followed them. Janczewski was addressing the conditions under which someone would participate at all. A working product still needed a customer willing to believe the surrounding system would treat them properly.

Another name on the CEO’s door

In February 2026, Coincover announced Jeremy Verba as its new CEO. Janczewski’s role became advisory. The company described a business that had safeguarded more than 600 businesses and protected over 22 million wallets since its founding. Those figures describe the platform’s reported reach; they give a sense of how far it had travelled from the initial idea.

The handover brought in an executive with experience at businesses including Walmart Video and eHarmony. For Janczewski, it changed his relationship with the company he had helped create. He continued as an advisor while another person took responsibility for the next phase of leadership.

His current work also extends into AI. Awen AI’s team page places him alongside Sharon Henley, with Janczewski responsible for strategy and commercial work and Henley focused on product and operations. The service begins with questions about business value, the people using a system and the safeguards needed to make it dependable.

That is a recognisable continuation of his earlier work. An unfamiliar technology arrives with a persuasive demonstration. Then someone has to decide where it belongs, how people will use it and who takes responsibility when it behaves unexpectedly. The questions require commercial judgement as well as technical capability.

On his Substack, Janczewski introduces himself as a dad in Cardiff working on bringing new technology into real businesses. The description is compact enough to leave room for the work itself. After coins, gold and crypto, his subject still includes the ordinary person at the other end of the system, hoping it will do what was promised.